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Thursday, May 10, 2012

Write What You Know?

Before The Morning v/s Once Upon A
Stormy Night: Write only about what you know?

Hello peeps! Delighted to be here with
ye all today – thanks, JoAnne, for having me over.

I always rely upon my hosts to provide
me with the topic they want me to address, and JoAnne asked me about
a very pertinent point...

For, you see, this May, I have 2 books
coming out.

May 7 sees the release of Before
The Morning (Corpus Brides: Book 2), a romantic
suspense/ espionage thriller, while May 29 will see the release of
Once Upon A Stormy Night, part of the 1NightStand series.

The first takes place between London
and Hastings in England, Nice and Arles in France, Prague in the
Czech Republic, and Las Vegas, Nevada. The second takes place on my
native island and the place I call home, Mauritius (which is – I
guess many of you won’t have heard of it before! – a small
tropical island in the southern Indian Ocean).

I haven’t been to most of the places
I mention/use as locales in Before The Morning, while I am
intimately acquainted with every setup/setting present in Once
Upon A Stormy Night.

We’re always told to “write what you know”... Can I apply this here, where these 2 books are
concerned? Not exactly.

Before The Morning is a romantic
suspense/espionage thriller. I couldn’t have set it in Mauritius,
because there’s just no way can such a huge clandestine operation
be carried off on such small a territory! And, since the heroine,
Rayne, makes her drunken lover, Ash, marry her on an ‘impulsive
whim’, I would’ve needed to take them to Vegas anyhow... and I’ve
never been to Vegas!

We’re also told to be “fresh”,
“innovative”, to “ get off the beaten track”... That’s how
I found myself one day on Facebook asking my friends and readers
about locales they wish to see in a book, and a childhood friend of
mine piped up that she’d never seen Prague – that so-beautiful
European city – in any book. She planted the seed of having Prague
as an important locale in the book... and yes, I’ve never been to
Prague!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauritius_23.08.2009_06-07-46.jpg

Once Upon A Stormy Night, on the
other hand, takes place in Mauritius, mainly in the capital city
waterfront shopping village, where my brother used to work in the
very posh Barkly Wharf offices. I’ve haunted the Caudan Waterfront
since its inception back in 1996, and the villa where the
one-night-stand takes place – very much a hotel we visited last
year, on the craggy, cliffy, rough southern coast. I close my eyes
and I picture every detail of these settings...

...but what about these places I’ve
never seen with my own eyes, let alone set foot in?

That, my friends, is where research
comes in... and there’s nothing more helpful for researching
locations than Youtube. From snippets of travel programs, to videos
uploaded by tourists (often peppered with their very personal
observations, that little something extra to give you a juicy detail
to work with), you can become an armchair traveler, and see the world
as if you were right there!

That’s how Prague came to life for me
in Before The Morning; how I stepped into the interiors of
Beyond Medispa, the upscale, cost-the-money-off-your-arse
beauty spa in Harvey Nichols in London, and The Ritz; how I placed
Rayne and Ash in the split-level villa located in a gated community
in the Henderson area in Las Vegas; Rayne’s walk through the
deserted lanes of the Roman necropolis in Arles, in the French
Provence.

I didn’t write about exactly what I
know – instead, I set out to learn what I could, and however I
could, about the things I didn’t know.

I can only hope these locations come
across as the magical places I got to “see” and imagine. But I
have an idea – why don’t you tell me what you think, when you
read the stories?

Thanks for having me over today, JoAnne
– it’s been an absolute pleasure!

From Mauritius with love,

Zee

Before The Morning

. . . is a time of great darkness. . .

A trained killer with borderline
sociopathic tendencies:

Rayne Cheltham traced out her life's
path when she was twelve: she would marry her best friend and bear
his children, and in the process, stifle the restless edge in her.
When he vows never to marry, she gives in to the darkness and becomes
a clandestine agent—until the day he walks into her world again,
and her carefully fabricated façade crumbles.

A former cop burned by life and his
personal demons:

When Ash Gilfoy meets a woman who
reminds him of his childhood best friend, he starts upon a path that
leads him down into an abyss once again. The day Rayne waltzes back
into his life, he knows she is his second chance, and the one who
will save him.

Each thinks the other is their
redemption . . . until they discover how deep the other's edge of
darkness goes

No one knows Rayne used to be a spy and
an assassin, and no one knows why Ash left the police force. The
secrets between them make them sit on a keg of gunpowder with a lit
fuse in their hands. Neither knows what 'normal' means now,
especially Rayne, whose whole life is built on a lie. Truth is
threatening to explode in their faces, and that is not the only
menace they have to face. Someone is out to get Rayne, and she must
disclose her past before it is too late.

Can Rayne and Ash survive all that's
thrown in their path? Can they hang on to the last thread of their
relationship, and can they emerge, still together and still alive, in
the morning after the deepest darkness?

You can also find her on Facebook,
Twitter, and Goodreads, as ZeeMonodee.

Once Upon A Stormy Night

British billionaire Lars Rutherford
came to the tiny island of Mauritius to take over directorship of his
best friend's shipping company. He's not here for anything but the
job, or – to the chagrin of the many matchmaking society mamas in
the country – to find the 'right woman' for him.

Corporate legal affairs specialist
Simmi Moyer is rich, beautiful, successful, and climbing the
executive ladder with tremendous speed. She's got it all – or does
she? Mauritian society shuns her for being single and childless, and
nothing she accomplishes will ever be enough.

Lars isn't looking for a woman; Simmi
isn't looking for a man. Both just want one night to forget their
precarious position in this traditional, culture-driven society.

But will a few stolen hours of solace
ever be enough, especially when they realize Madame Eve might just
have paired them with the one they didn't know they were looking for?

The tempest brewed by uncalled-for
yearning in their hearts when they meet, and the desire for something
more substantial than one night of pleasure, builds between them,
while outside, a real-life cyclone storms on the island and enconsces
them in a world where only the two of them exist.

Before the night is over, both Lars and
Simmi will have to decide whether they'll walk out the next morning
alone, or if they can put themselves on the line to step out
together.